The 2024 election - 'Every time he's indicted his poll numbers go up'

It was hardly the triumphant return to Washington that he and his campaign imagined. Donald Trump was back in America's capital this week, not as president but an accused criminal.

- David Smith

"Not guilty," he pleaded in a hushed courtroom to four charges stemming from the effort to overturn his defeat in the 2020 presidential election.

But as observers savoured a sombre yet reaffirming moment for the rule of law, a follower of the former US president could be seen outside court waving a giant flag. "Trump or death," it declared, not far from Congress where lethal violence erupted on 6 January 2021.

Trump is now twice impeached and thrice indicted but his support is holding firm. Each negative in a court of law translates into a positive in the court of public opinion. He remains the dominant figure among Republican voters who share his view that he is being unfairly targeted by a justice system bent on helping Joe Biden.

"The more the indictments, the better his poll numbers, the easier the argument that it's two standards of justice and Donald Trump is persecuted and picked on," said Bill Whalen, a policy fellow at the Hoover Institution thinktank in Palo Alto, California. "It's very funny, considering he's the pre-eminent bully in American politics, that no one plays the victim card better than Donald Trump."

 A whiff of criminality or scandal used to be career ending for politician. President Richard Nixon resigned over Watergate; Vice-president Spiro Agnew quit after being charged with bribery, tax evasion and conspiracy; Gary Hart's presidential campaign collapsed over to allegations of an extramarital affair; Anthony Weiner resigned from Congress after a series of sexting scandals.

But Trump has shattered the laws of political physics. He has made the state and federal charges - 78 across three jurisdictions - a central plank of his campaign platform, casting himself as a martyr. At rallies he portrays the cases as an attack on his supporters. He told a crowd last week in Erie, Pennsylvania: "They're not indicting me, they're indicting you."